Make Your Mai Tai With Mezcal or Rye

A pair of Mai Tai riffs demonstrate how flexible the format can be.

The Mai Tai is the undisputed king of tiki drinks. Made by combining rum with lime juice, orange liqueur, and the nut syrup orgeat, a properly made Mai Tai is sweet, rich, bright, and boozy without fully veering into brooding territory. It’s one of the great pleasures of the cocktail kingdom. 

Created in the 1940s by Victor “Trader Vic” Bergeron, it was designed to make the most an exemplary rum, J. Wray and Nephew 17. When that bottle eventually disappeared from the market, Bergeron moved on to trying to replicate the flavor of the long-aged J. Wray with various rum blends. 

Today, serious tiki heads typically make the drink with a mix of Jamaican rum and Martinique rum or rhum agricole — although at least one of today’s tiki luminaries, Martin Cate of Smuggler’s Cove, has sometimes called for a single rum, Denizen Merchant Reserve, designed specifically to work in Mai Tais. 

The Mai Tai, in other words, was created to be a spirit showcase — a way of enhancing and elevating a liquor or liquor blend. And although the Mai Tai and the tiki vibe will always and forever be primarily (and correctly) associated with rum, that spirit doesn’t necessarily have to be rum.

Or, at the very least, it doesn’t have to be only rum. You can make a delicious Mai Tai-style drink by mixing rum and something else. 

So today we are going to look at a pair of Mai Tai riffs built on blends of rum and some other spirit — mezcal in one case, rye whiskey in another. 

Both of these drinks make a case for the Mai Tai as a cocktail format as much as a specific cocktail, almost in the way that a sandwich is a format that encompasses everything from a chicken club to a hamburger. Even better, both follow my personal guideline for iterative drink names, which is that they should always find some way to reference the original cocktail name. These are clever drinks in the glass and on the menu.

I Did It…Maaaaiiiiii Way 

I think there are a number of ways to make an excellent Mai Tai; we looked at three of them around this time last year. But nearly all of well-made Mai Tais share some common features.